Death And Can

The four founding members of Can were Holger Czukay, Jaki Liebezeit, Michael Karoli, and Irmin Schmidt. (Not in order of importance, a concept that they all would have rejected in its entirety.) Can were the best band that you've never heard of, and the echos of their influence have been important to rock, pop, jazz, classical, and progressive music since the day that the band was founded. They had no intention to be popular, to be groundbreaking, to be well liked, or to make money, although they casually, almost accidentally, managed to do all of those things. If you have heard their music at all, it was probably in a film score, or, if you are German, the score of a TV show. Or even an advertising jingle. Those things paid the bills, while Can made records that were gobbled up in the dozens by enthusiastic fans.

This was the 1970s, and early on, suddenly, there was a burst of energy from Germany. Really, energy, since the music followed the rules of physics as well as the rules of music. Kraftwerk was the door to this music, but Can was the destination. There were a lot of very good outfits in this scene, Guru Guru; Amun Duul; Popol Vu; Faust; Tangerine Dream; to name a few. I will still say that Can was the destination, because their music was the most consistently excellent, challenging, and entertaining.

I am not the type who keeps up with things; I am the type who lets things slip into the twilight of memory. I do not forget things that had a powerful effect on me, and I revisit the music and the visual arts that I have loved along the line, but they will usually be considered as objects of memory, as opposed to ongoing interests. I was surprised, for instance, to discover that Holger Czukay, Can's bass player, had released a steady stream of terrific solo-albums during the 1980s and 1990s. There was one question, however, that remained in the back of my head for almost fifty years: why did this positive explosion of innovative electronic music appear in Germany in the 1970s?

A friend from that time recently made me aware of a book called, “Can: All Gates Open,” which presents the story of Can in microscopic detail. I got a Kindle copy, and I'm a few chapters into it, and I can report that it will be answering my question about “why?”

Thinking and reading about Can, I have unfortunately discovered that only Irmin Schmidt remains alive. I am glad to have lived as long as I have, but there is a sadness in the closeness of death that comes along with it. I am daily reminded that my contemporaries are succumbing to death, which forcefully implies that I will be joining them soon. Michael Karoli, Can's guitarist and the youngest of the group, has been dead for some time. Holger and Jaki both died in 2017, and it occurred to me that I could easily have died that year myself. Very easily, and, in fact, I probably came very close.

Can one experience a heart attack and simply wait it out, without dying? It appears that I did just that some time in 2017. The facts suggest that it did happen, as later confirmed by a medical professional and an experienced heart attack victim (my friend Bill, five heart attacks, all with bypass operations). Why would anyone just wait it out, when the symptoms were so unambiguous? That's a fair question. The answer is in the variations in the human personality.

Kevin Smith is a popular, successful performer and movie maker. I enjoy his work, and I'm glad that he's okay. He has traditionally been on the heavy side, and after a stand-up comedy set not long ago he began to experience symptoms. Chest pains, thermal blasts, shortness of breath, left arm pain, the usual. He laid on the floor and had someone call 911, this all happened backstage in the dressing room right after his set. The hospital rushed him through an echocardiogram, an ECG, and whatever else, maybe a cat scan, and they decided to put him on the table immediately and do an angiogram. They found things they didn't like and they put in a few stents. They had fixed some very constricted areas of the one they call, “the widow maker.” In America, that all comes to about $100,000, including the ambulance and a night or two in the cardiac ICU. After that he was fine. That's the way it happens when the victim is a relatively well-adjusted person with some money, great insurance, and a successful career.

But I'm not that guy. You may recall that I live in Thailand, for one thing. My story begins in 2016, when there was a shocking emotional event in my life. That followed closely on the heels of another shocking emotional event in 2014. In 2017 my blood pressure started to crawl upwards. Now, bear in mind that I had never had a chest pain in my life, no one on either side of my family has ever, to my knowledge, died of a heart attack, and after a previous echocardiogram the doctor had told me that I had “the heart of a race horse.” A pattern emerged in 2017: my blood pressure would elevate beyond acceptable limits as the evening progressed. This happened whether I was having cocktails or not. It got to the point where I was taking notes and seeing a cardiologist. I had a machine to keep track.

One evening, at about nine p.m., I began to experience chest pains. These grew quickly to alarming proportions. My left arm began to hurt. I went to the couch and took my blood pressure. It was 183/105. I had never seen anything close to that previously. I returned to my desk, where by now my ears were whistling, and the chest pains were sharp, and both arms were aching, and my hands were beginning to hurt. So the question became: what should I do? I could get a taxi to the hospital, or I could call the hospital and they would send an ambulance. It's a very good hospital, no fooling around, and they had my file. I thought, sure, and I'll get there and my BP will be way down, the pains will have subsided, and then I'll have to hang around all night while they do a stress test and an echo, which is already a few hundred dollars, and maybe a cat scan, which is another eight hundred. So I said fuck it. Let's just see what happens. And I rode it out. It took about a half hour, with half of that time being descending action. After a half hour, my BP was within normal limits (if a bit on the high side), and I felt fine.

Over the next few months, I got the stress-test, and the echo, and the cat scan, and the angioplasty with the stents. Two stents on the widow maker, in fact. Over that few months I had experienced recurring chest pains, which I treated with nitro pills provided by my cardiologist. They worked every time. The difference in our approaches to the problem is the difference between Mr. Smith and me. My budget is a closely watched thing, with narrow margins for error, and my health insurance policy is very limited in scope (although they do pay their share, which I appreciate). But the critical difference is that I am deeply depressed, and I would leave behind only a lifetime of underachievement. Only my second wife would mourn my passing, and she's a Buddhist, so she would accept it pretty readily at my age. It was easy for my to sit there and think, “fuck it, if I die, I die, I'm riding this shit out.”

The early death of Mr. Karoli saddens me. He gave a lot to the world, and he died at the age of 53 of an unspecified cancer. That always makes me suspicious that the cause of death was actually something more dramatic, but that's probably because I watched too many years of “All My Children” when I was a younger man (age 35 to 55). Mr. Czukay and Mr. Liebezeit lived fuller, longer lives, but their deaths were tragic considering the contributions that they had made in life. I wish Mr. Schmidt the best of luck in what I call, “the place of bad roads.” (Old Age.) If he wants to live forever, that's okay with me.

Me? I've had my seventy, my three-score-and-ten. Plus. So I'm on Golden Time. Whatever it is that overtakes me, and whenever that happens, is okay with me. As for funeral arrangements, to paraphrase Mark Twain, “the person in whose honor the event is being given does not care if there are flowers.”